Book description
Sally Fulton is a hospital almoner, who left the job, for which she had
a genuine vocation and aptitude, to marry a radiologist, Tony. The
marriage was a failure and she has never understood that the chief cause
of this was her deadly inclination, all too common among professional
women, to bring her professional technique into her private life and to
its problems. Tony leaves her, and she subsequently divorces him.
Returning to her former job, though in another hospital, she is haunted
by guilt, for the only fault she has been able to recognise in her own
past conduct is her former jealousy of a girl lab assistant who had
attracted Tony’s attention. Unexpectedly Tony is brought to the hospital
as a surgical emergency, dangerously ill. Sally now begins to learn how
desperately wrong she was about him, and about herself. After their
divorce he had not married the little ‘lab’ girl, but someone quite
different. Sally’s guilt is increased, and she is further confused by
the fact that she now loves and is loved by one of the surgical
registrars at the hospital. In an overwhelming impulse to atone in some
way for the past before beginning a new life, she gets into touch with
the ‘lab’ girl, Hazel, finds her in very poor circumstances, and gets
her a job at the hospital. But Hazel is a born delinquent, a type quite
beyond Sally’s experience and comprehension. As Hazel sinks further and
further Sally goes on trying frantically to save her. Her obsessive
conscience and her trained zeal in following up this ‘case’, very nearly
wreck her engagement. Sally crashes blindly along the path of Hazel’s
redemption, only to find that it leads straight into a pit of despair
and death. From that pit she herself emerges, freed of her obsession, to
find happiness but at a terrible cost, for two people die as a result of
her innocent, essentially well-meaning interference. Josephine Bell
was born Doris Bell Collier in Manchester, England. Between 1910 and
1916 she studied at Godolphin School, then trained at Newnham College,
Cambridge until 1919. At the University College Hospital in London she
was granted M. R.C. S. and L. R.C. P. in 1922, and a M. B. B. S. in
1924.
Bell was a prolific author, writing forty-three novels and numerous
uncollected short stories during a forty-five year period.
Many of her short stories appeared in the London Evening Standard
. Using her pen name she wrote numerous detective novels beginning in
1936, and she was well-known for her medical mysteries. Her early books
featured the fictional character Dr. David Wintringham who worked at
Research Hospital in London as a junior assistant physician. She helped
found the Crime Writers' Association in 1953 and served as chair during
1959-60.
